No

by Perry McCarney

Created on: November 03, 2011   Last Updated: January 08, 2012

While the weapons' technology of humanity has the potential to develop into a threat to the continued existence of Earth, the planet, the numeric value of the global human population does not. The ever increasing global human population severely threatens numerous of the other species that co-habit our planet with extinction and our destructive and resource wasteful behaviors are indeed causing the extinction of many species, primarily those that are endemic (local to a small geographical area). Sufficiently so that most ecological scientists and their research shows that today's world is in its sixth major extinction event, potentially even more severe than the one that saw dinosaurs become extinct approximately 65 million years ago.

If this debate question asked if human population growth threatened elements of the planet's biosphere the answer would clearly be in the affirmative. But to actually threaten the Earth's continuance requires the development of weapons capable of breaking the planet into pieces. We do not, yet, have this capability! We may well develop that ability, but if we do it will be due to our social insanity, rather than how many of us are living on our planet. Our global human population threatens the multitude of life existing on Earth, not the planet itself.  

Primarily because of the wasteful and unsustainable practices, exemplified by our oceanic fishing industry, encouraged by our capitalistic economy and the suppression or limitation of sustainable and clean technologies that dirty technology "old-wealth" corporations use their political power to maintain. Continuing such unsustainable practices is likely to result in humanity itself being threatened with extinction within the next few generations. Nevertheless, the planet itself, and even life in some form, will almost certainly survive our species suicide.

Planets are physical bodies of sufficiently enormous mass that they form relatively spherical bodies of matter in the orbit of the truly tremendous masses of continually ongoing nuclear fusion that we call stars. Stars are so massive that the gravitational attraction they exert constrains all other masses, whether planets, planetoids, asteroids or comets, within the range of their gravitational attraction to orbit around them. The Earth is unique in the Solar system as the only planet with a thin film of biological organisms living in its biosphere, which ranges from approximately 5 miles below to 5 miles above the surface level of the sea. But, quite clearly, the biological life on the Earth is NOT what makes it a planet.     

Planet Earth would be threatened by collision with another astral body of sufficient size that the impact could cause it to break up, resulting in another asteroid belt orbiting the Sun. Humanity, no matter how large its population becomes, is unlikely to threaten its existence unless it develops the "planet-buster" bombs of science fiction. It is the technology our scientists might create that could threaten it, regardless of how many of us are living within our Mother Planet's biosphere.

Even if all of the weapons of mass destruction in the world today, from the arsenals of the too many nations holding them, were unleashed at the same time in a massive Third World War conflict, the planet Earth would continue and almost certainly still have some life still living upon it. Multi-cellular life might be eradicated, but even that is unlikely. Some of the hardier insects, such as cockroaches and the magnificently weird sealife living around geothermal vents in the ocean deeps would probably survive. Single-cell bacteria, especially the extremophile archaea bacteria, might mutate drastically, but would almost certainly be available to begin again the evolution of biological life on Earth.

Our chemical and biological weapons are designed to kill people and only as a side effect, large animals. They in no way threaten the planet Earth. Most nuclear weapons are designed for use as air-burst weapons, exploding above their targets. To threaten our planet itself we would need to embed a significant amount of the global number of nuclear weapons miles deep below the Earth's surface, for there to be any chance that their massive explosions might possibly have any chance of breaking up the planet itself. That is not the case now and seems highly unlikely to occur in the near future at least. And seems an unlikely thing to occur even into the far future. 

As such, only those who consider the planet Earth and the life that lives upon it to be synonymous, one and the same, could possibly answer this debate question in the affirmative. Admittedly, from our human perspective, there is the psychological and emotional tendency to think that planet Earth and humanity are entwined, but quite simply that is not true. Earth was here long before humanity came along (evolved), and unless we develop and USE the weapons technology to break it up into little pieces, the Earth and some form of life will continue to be here when the human species has long ceased to be a part of Earth's biosphere.

Only if we start USING our intelligence to provide for ourselves and our fellow planetary life in a sustainable and sensible way, beneficial to all life, is there any likelihood that humanity might continue to reside on the Earth's surface until our Sun expands and destroys the Earth hundreds of millions of years from now. We tend to think of ourselves as superior to the dinosaurs because they are extinct, but they dominated life on Earth for millions of years and we have only managed a few hundred thousand thus far. The way we are behaving these days, how likely are we to continue existing as a species for another thousand years, let alone millions? 

Our ever increasing global human population is a severe threat to many species of life on planet Earth, including ourselves. But only our weapons technology development is actually a threat to our planet itself, and that is an ongoing threat regardless of how many of us there are, until the global human population count is zero.

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